Modelling the Impact of Various Strategies for Improving the Outdoor Thermal Comfort at a City Level

One of the greatest environmental concerns for the long-term viability is to develop sustainability of future cities and to plan heat mitigation techniques for improving human outdoor thermal comfort. In this research work, a case study for Ahmedabad City has been considered which has hot, semi-arid climate-Bsh based on Köppen climate classification and aim of the study is to improve the outdoor thermal comfort and to plan heat mitigation strategies of Ahmedabad City, Gujarat, India, by assessing the outdoor thermal comfort of a city with analysing mean radiant temperature with thermal indices such as PET, PMV/PPD and UTCI with the application of ENVI-met V5.0.2 Software. For conducting the study, an urban canopy of Ahmedabad City has been examined from Maninagar area, and it has an administrative boundary of 7692.33 m2 was model in ENVI-met (SPACES). The analysis was done during 09 May 2021 a hot summer day and 17 December 2021 a cool winter day to create a challenging environmental situation, and the input data for the simulations process are based on the meteorological station of GPCB located in Maninagar area. Software simulations were performed (for 24 h), and based on simulation of modelling, the four different case scenarios in ENVI-met model result are presented. The simulated results show that the suggested strategies have an effect on OTC, which means adopting case-2 and case-3 in particular location can reduce the temperature around 1.5–2 °C with Tmrt reduce up to 1.02–6.20 °C in summer and also, adopting case-2 and case-3 in particular location can increase the temperature around 0.5–1.0 °C in winter. The study provides better understanding of heat mitigation strategies on human thermal comfort at a city level (Ahmedabad), and the findings of this research provide finer suggestions for improving outdoor thermal comfort environment.